Nearly four years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil and gas disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—an event that blew away the record books for the nation’s worst accidental oil spill—BP is fully back in business, and drilling is booming in the Gulf of Mexico.

NASA satellite imgae on May 20, 2010. Oil smoothes the ocean surface, making the Sun’s reflection brighter near the centerline of the path of the satellite, and reducing the scattering of sunlight in other places. As a result, the oil slick is brighter than the surrounding water in some places (image center) and darker than the surrounding water in others (image lower right). Photo credit: Wikimedia commons

Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lifted the ban that prevented BP from engaging in any contracts with the federal government, paving the way for BP to resume bidding on leases for oil and gas development on public lands and waters, including the Gulf.

BP already holds more than 600 lease blocks—more than any other operator in the Gulf—and they currently have ten rigs working to drill new deepwater wells, like the Macondo well that failed in 2010.

But they’re not the only game in town. There are dozens of other operators working in the Gulf, in deep water and shallow. One of our fans just tipped us off to a nifty dataset that shows just how busy things are offshore here and around the world: the locations of active Mobile Offshore Drilling Units (MODUs). Here’s a look at the MODUs working right now in the Gulf of Mexico:

Not to be confused with the thousands of fixed offshore oil and gas production platforms, MODUs are the rigs that get towed from place to place to drill new wells, and do maintenance operations on existing wells. They range from the relatively small and simple jack-up rigs that work in shallow water, to the huge and complex semisubmersible rigs, like the Deepwater Horizon, that handle the technically challenging deepwater work.

Comments

Ina Mitchell

EPA – did your brains leak out while you slept? How could you possibly give BP drilling rights???

Denise H

Outrageous! The EPA all too CLEARLY works for the corporations and BIG OIL. Despite all the continued havoc rippling through the ecosystems in the Gulf from the DeepWater calamity, and likely to continue for generations, the Environmental PROTECTION Agency green-lights more drilling? Why? Have there been some developments – such as how to cope with disasters like DeepWater without dumping millions of gallons of even more toxic dispersants? No. Look for more ruination, deformed fish, drowned birds, dead manatees and blind shrimp to come…. I’m utterly disgusted.

toni wintroub

Yeah….many of us share your disgust. I want to know why the republicans are so anti-EPA when the agency so easily goes belly-up and does what BM wants.

issyco

There are many of us that are tired of the big polluters in the world, BP being one of them, along with all the other big oil companies. Monsanto being another, along with all the big pesticide companies. If one doesn’t kill us by polluting our air and waters, the other will kill us by poisoning not just our food, but the animals that give us our food! It we don’t act soon, it will be out of our hands. The Pacific Ocean is dying very fast and all life in it from the tsunami in Japan and that’s another story altogether!
Put it all together and what do you have? The end of days for all of us and it’s coming soon,

smytor

One wonders where all the wealthy people, who are raking it in by destroying the earth, are going to go to enjoy spending their bits of green paper once the planet is too toxic to live on and there’s nothing left to buy. If we have descendants, they will curse us for what we’ve allowed to happen. If shallow airheads, who don’t even realize what is happening, remain in the majority, there will be no grass roots effort to make the shift to nonpolluting energy sources. Don’t worry. Go shopping.

GOM

All great civilizations end up collapsing in on themselves due to greed of the few. Rome for instance was paying Attila to keep thug clans at bay. It pissed them off they had to pay a Hun king for protection, so they had him murdered. It didn’t take long before Rome was sacked and burned. It is no different today. BP paying EPA for protection and ‘rights’ as the GOM is sacked and burned…

hello

shameful…

hello

and i watched a report on tv last night of raising co2 levels in the oceans causing massive deaths for oysters and other sea life, and then i turn around and read this stupidity. plus we destroyed all the marshes so there is nothing to clean the water naturally.

The_Truth_Seeker

This might be the only company that is trying to make sure there won’t be another BP type disaster: Why isn’t there more media focus on how to prevent future disasters?